[wordup] Are Hollywood smokers inextinguishable?

[Adam Shand]

Fascinating article on the politics of smoking and what Hollywood is  
to do about all the old movies.

Adam.

Via: Google News Alert
Source: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/129815/are_hollywood_smokers_inextinguishable.html

Are Hollywood smokers inextinguishable?
Peter Morae

Not even a decade of double-overtime at ILM could remove the rafts of  
smoke from Hollywood's heritage
How can Hollywood clean up its act on tobacco with nearly a century of  
smoke-filled film that it wants to re-sell us?
I was interested to read, in our review, how the producers handled the  
thorny issue of smoking in the first episode of The US's version hit  
UK retro-cop-show Life On Mars. The original Gene Hunt (Philip  
Glenister) had to face up to a fag-free future in LoM sequel Ashes To  
Ashes under new restrictions on smoking in the workplace - including  
BBC studios (where 12,000 herbal cigarettes were consumed for the two- 
series run of the UK Life On Mars - which makes the sequel's title  
rather apposite).

It's the way of things - even arch-puffer David Bowie, who supplied  
the theme songs to both the UK and stateside versions from his back  
catalogue, quit the habit five years ago.

I do not want to discuss here the very thorny polemics that tend to  
(excuse me) flare up between the abolitionists and the libertines  
regarding the subject of the influence of smoking in films and TV.  
Rather, let's presume that the impetus to rid the world of cigarettes  
by bans, restrictions, taxes, education and every other means  
available to the anti-smoking lobby will prevail, even against the  
might of the tobacco industry and its lobbyists and advocates.

What, then, are we going to do about the century of screen smoking  
that sits enmeshed in the very best - as well as the worst - output of  
cinema over the last 100 years, and television over the last 60 or so?  
And how can we convincingly omit a practice that was almost universal  
at a period in time that new historical drama - such as Life On Mars  
US - might be attempting to depict?

Since 'retro' became so magnetic and profitable - from the sale of old  
US TV shows in large and affordable DVD box-sets, to actually setting  
a show like Life On Mars in one of the smokiest and grittiest periods  
of New York's 20th century history - this is about as thorny a problem  
for the anti-smoking contingent in Hollywood as it could possibly be.

In the Life On Mars pilot show, as our review noted, people are seen  
with lit cigarettes, but hold them as if they were incense sticks.  
Clinton-like, there's no obvious inhaling going on. You can almost see  
the elaborate storyboarding and political wrangling behind the  
depiction of smoking in Life On Mars US - the compromises, the  
arbitrators, the wrangling, and the legally-required presence of the  
New York Fire Department as soon as one of the shabby tecs lights up a  
herbal fake in an enclosed set.

By the most conservative estimates, 40% of male adults were smokers in  
the US in 1973. You can probably add a few percentage points for  
stress-driven jobs like police work, and loads of points for the  
criminal fraternity, so any cop drama set in that period is going to  
have to look smokey or it's going to have to look 'wrong'.

There are three interested parties here:

- The creative forces (writers, directors, etc) who use the depiction  
of smoking not only to provide a quick and dirty shorthand for general  
historical context, but also - as in George Clooney's Goodnight And  
Good Luck (2006) and David Fincher'sZodiac (2007) - to recreate an  
event, period or person with reasonable historical accuracy.

- The tobacco lobby, who have been as keen to promote their product in  
movies as any other industry, and more successful than many.

- The anti-smoking lobby, whose objection to the continuing  
'promotion' of smoking in US movies and TV is compounded by the  
'tobacco paradox': its belief that the tobacco industry was in any  
case creating all the smoke that shows like Life On Mars US must now  
recreate for reasons of historical accuracy (see link in previous  
paragraph); thus making the cycle of 'addiction by media osmosis' - as  
the anti-smoking lobby believes - circular and hard to break.

The solutions for historical drama are not clear, but obviously you  
can't continue to have historical characters nursing cigarettes that  
they never smoke. Nor can you claim that all your characters fall  
within the non-smoking bracket in whatever period of history you're  
trying to depict - even the most rudimentary understanding of  
demographics won't support it. Unless you set your drama in a  
fireworks factory, a nursery or Skylab, it's real hard to keep a year  
like 1973 tobacco-free.

Back in the present, screen smoking is evolving rather than just going  
away: exiled smokers now gather together to convene amongst themselves  
outside in all weathers, which is proving a romantic/gritty new  
scenario for films like My Blueberry Nights.

With the re-glamorisation of fractured or damaged characters (which  
significantly preceded The Dark Knight, whatever Hollywood may think),  
the anti-smoking contingent's previous insistence on 'demonising'  
smoking acts is getting too risky a bet: if the hero's a villain, and  
so is the villain, then who the hell gets to light up? Neither? Both?

Negotiations between the anti-smokers and the creatives have also led  
to some very clunky scripting trade-offs, where cigarettes are  
frequently removed from the packet but never lit; this happens to  
Martin Sheen immediately before his murder (smoker's karma) inThe  
Departed, and to Kate Bosworth, whose heroic suitor won't let her  
light up in Superman Returns. But most often it's the Sheen/Departed  
treatment for the nicotine-addicted: out comes the smoke, and over the  
side of the building goes the smoker, almost magically punished by the  
MPAA, like the knights who give the wrong answer in the 'bridge' scene  
in Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

It's fake. The audience - smokers and non-smokers, advocates and  
resisters alike - can smell the propaganda like a lit Gauloise on a  
bus. It isn't subliminal enough. It breaks story, movie and mood, and  
undermines the realism that the director is usually working so hard to  
achieve. It's the kind of proselytisation found in far more soporific  
quantities in USA children's TV; but here in a significantly more  
expensive product that's notionally aimed at adults.

In the meantime the tobacco industry rubs its hands at the cultural  
loophole that lets historical drama fill the silver screen with a  
miasma of tobacco; for it, Hollywood's future is definitely in the past.

Smoking has been such a part of the film-maker's core language since  
the days of Méliès that trying to excise it can prove to be like  
trying to type out a book with several common consonants prised off  
the keyboard. Lighting up on-screen became short-hand for so many  
expressions of character and mood over such a long period of Hollywood  
and US TV history, that it seems as hard to give up as the habit  
itself. On the other hand you could also call it a cliché; one might  
hope - even wish - that writers and actors stretch their imagination  
further to develop an equivalent cinematic idiom with more versatility  
and depth.

The tobacco industry - if you believe the anti-tobacco industry - has  
done its work well over the past 60-70 years, and not even a decade of  
double-overtime at ILM and Weta Digital combined could remove the  
rafts of smoke from Hollywood's heritage. In certain cases, removing  
scenes of smoking would leave you only with the opening and closing  
credits; if that.

What's left? Will new DVD releases of old classics find classic  
children's filmssnuggling up with skin-flicks and torture-porn on the  
highest rack in Blockbuster? Will every scene of smoking now have to  
be accompanied by a lengthy subtitle warning from the surgeon general?

The move to drive smoking onto the streets has been a sweeping storm  
of legislation in Europe, America and (increasingly) Asia over the  
last decade, but there seems no way that Hollywood and US TV can  
excise the evil weed - particularly not from its enormously lucrative  
back catalogue - at the same dizzying speed without destroying the  
appeal of the product. If you want to look on legacy screen smoking as  
a cancer, then it's quite possibly inoperable.

Not even the most successful bodice-ripper or adaptation of Dickens  
has ever succeeded in bringing back the demand for snuff as a consumer  
item, and the aim of the current anti-smoking movement in Hollywood  
seems to be that we one day regard screen-smoking with the same  
bewilderment as that extinct habit. At that point, we may be permitted  
again to enjoy the best of classic cinema without caveats, warnings or  
absurdly inappropriate maturity ratings.

But while 20-25% of the Western population still smokes, the tobacco  
paradox will continue to contribute to the problem in the form of  
legacy content; in what's already 'in the can', on our screens, our re- 
runs and in our DVD players. The struggle to get that 20% of smokers  
in the population down to 0% will still prove to be the (continuing)  
work of decades rather than years if we're to do it without another  
Volstead act. In the current depressed mood, bringing with it a  
wistful atavism for times and styles past, it's not the easiest moment  
for Hollywood to detox.